Teoria de Jogos

13:54 Feb 8, 2009 

Good points Kathryn. I used 'game' without quotes in the search because Google would pull up single and plural occurrences. Occurrences were 'Theory of games(s)' was used would also be found. In other words, the search would detect all these options without prejudice, allowing a qualitative assessment of the results. (I tried it with 'games' - without quotes - just to confirm the results were not skewed towards the singular).

Thinking further, I don't put much weight on the actual number of hits. When you are not using quotes for the key phrase, I don't think the actual hit count is of relevance as many hits will be for articles that use the words in a different context. Using the AND boolean operator between words and phrases in quotes can help narrow things down, but I still find irrelevant articles in the search lists.

In a case like this, I take the fact that the term I am thinking of using (which here was 'game theory' in any case) is used in the same context (degree courses in economics) to show that it is a safe translation. I sometimes send myself an email with links to suitable examples for my own reference and, if it has been a difficult decision on what to use, may explain this in a translator's note or cover email to the client. In this case I'd probably use these links:
http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/econ/prospective/grad/courses/ms...

http://www.economia.univr.it/fol/main?ent=oi&aa=2007/2008&co...

Though, of course, just because an English usage is commonplace, it doesn't mean other possible translations are incorrect. Care is also needed with very specialised language as common usage (of legal terms, for example) may not be the most appropriate. So, in my view, qualitative assessment of search results is more important than quantitative assessment.

21:56 Feb 7, 2009 

One thing many people don't realize is that Google will search for variations (both game and games, for example) unless you put the term in quotation marks. So using your example, you might come up with somewhat different results searching for

theory "game" degree in economics university
vs.
theory "games" degree in economics university

Useful to know if you're interested in which variant is more correct.

Most people know about putting a phrase in quotes, but they may not know about putting a single term in quotes and how that affects the results. I only learned about this trick about a year ago when I was trying to do a search for walk-in medical clinics in Maryland (the US state I live in, whose postal code is MD). I kept getting results from all over the country, because it considered any site with the abbreviation "MD" to also be a valid result. Since most medical clinics have MDs on staff, this was essentially all of them. When I searched for walk-in clinic "Maryland", it only returned those results that also contained the state name.

19:20 Feb 7, 2009 

Interesting to see the google hit count being used for substantiation.

I tried a search on (no quotes): theory game degree in economics university

This brought up various economics courses and CVs (resumes), where the term used was 'game theory', at least on the first few pages I looked through.

I repeated the search using 'games' instead of 'game' to see if that made any difference, and it brought up the same links to courses etc. using 'game theory'.

That's not to say there are not lots of hits and academic texts on 'Theory of games' if that expression is entered, just that in course terms 'game theory' seems more usual.